To All the Cyber Thieves out there,
We want to say we're shocked, or even angry. And we are, obviously. None of us expected to endure this pain. And some of us didn't expect it twice. We didn't expect to be fucked over a second time by our banks, or the government, but some of us were. And we're all royally pissed, of course, at those groups. But that pales in comparison to how we feel about you.
See, we can respect common thieves, pickpockets, con men, swindlers, hoaxers, muggers, burglars, and even robbers. We can respect the man with a gun pointed at our heads in a dark alley. We can even respect the woman who swipes our phones and wallets while we drink. We can respect them. Granted, we're respectful because they're threatening us. But we respect them nonetheless. What they do has a sense of art to it, even if it pisses us off to no end. They can look us dead in the eyes, often with a smile or smirk, a cute little wink or pout. And they're willing to look us in the eye as they steal from us, or willing to face the chance that we're home or catch them. They do what they do to our faces.
And then there's you people. See, you are all an argument for Darwinism. You've adapted to know how to take as little risk as possible. You hack our Amazon accounts, you hack our bank accounts, you even hack our emails. You set up complicated code crackers and server farms. Indeed, sometimes all you need to do is send an email to an address on a list, just enough to bypass the scam email filter. And we must make such easy targets, because sometimes we email you back. Sometimes we just don't check our bank accounts. Sometimes you change the password and lock us out. Sometimes you just have no imagination and order a bunch of stuff before we even notice, usually late at night. In summation, you never show your faces, likely because they're so ugly not even your mother could love them, to your victims. There's a reason masks exist for thieves.
And sometimes, it's just bad luck, or bad karma, whichever you prefer. You must think we deserve it, or that we won't miss it. Or maybe you just don't care. Or maybe we aren't real to you. We find this more likely, since you're too cowardly to show your faces. You don't steal from the little old ladies you know, you steal from the little old lady in the next state over. Or maybe you steal from the little old lady in America from India. Maybe from the veteran who simply wants someone to talk to. Or maybe from the suburban house wife. At any rate, it's us you decide to steal from.
Why you, in your seemingly infinite intelligence and infinite lack of a spine, choose mostly lower- and middle- class people to steal from is beyond us, we'd be going after far richer people than us, because not only will they not miss the money, they also have far more to take- not that we condone it, of course, just an observation on how, for all your cleverness, you steal from people who have very little to steal.
Maybe you're stealing from a call center in a third world country (in which case, we respect you at least a little more, because you need to eat). Or maybe you're stealing from the comfort of your posh, bought and paid for home with stolen money, taken from total strangers, who may not notice your crime for days, weeks, months even. And you can do it from right next door, or even from the other side of the planet.
See, that's the beauty of your little scheme. You never have to see us, and we never have to see you. You never have to look you in the eye. And you never have any reason to question yourself. You can clear out our bank accounts, max out our credit cards, rack up parking fines and criminal charges. All while we sit, blissfully unaware of what you're doing. It's clever, really.
Well, it's not clever, but it is another c-word. Cowardly. You're like the cockroaches who scurry away when the lights come on. You never see the people you steal from. You just spend and spend and spend, in a capitalistic paradise. You ruin lives, ruin people's sense of dignity and self-respect. Some people, tragically, kill themselves because of what you do. In fact, some of us have tried to kill ourselves in the past. Are you genuinely unaware of what you've done? Do you genuinely need the money so bad that you can't help yourself but to clear out our bank accounts, to steal our homes, to con us out of thousands of dollars in honeypot scams? Is an honest living foreign to you? If you had a tenth the effort towards an honest living as you do towards stealing from us, you might be millionaires.
Our biggest question isn't even "how do you sleep at night," but "which one of us paid for the bed you sleep on?" We suppose you can say you "earned" your money, but placing skimmers on card scanners, hacking into databases, or even just walking around with an RFID scanner, or using a brute force number cracker, or asking us questions in an email, or conning us out of money for your snapchats, dropboxes, etc. is hardly work. Or maybe you entice those of us who are young, possibly underage, people out of their nudes, only to blackmail them. Inside Edition recently did a segment on one of those victims. He killed himself. Dr. Phil did a segment on a similar victim once, who met the same fate.
At least common thieves will face their victims. You hide behind screens. And if one of us slips through your fingers, or one of us runs out of money, you just move on to the next one. But the damage you leave behind is real. And we have to live with it for months, years, decades, sometimes forever. Sometimes it doesn't end with us, but with our children or grandchildren. And you can't feign ignorance, it's all over the news.
Now, you've stolen our dignity, our self-respect, our self-worth, our actual worth, our bank accounts, our sanities, our sleep, our health. You've ruined our relationships, our marriages, our ability to trust, our faith in God and in humanity. You've even managed to ruin our faith in our banks, in Amazon, in Ebay, in Walmart. You've ruined our trust in ourselves. You've ruined our lives.
In summation, we aren't angry. We are pissed. And when you die, no god, no saint, no angel, no human who knows what you've done, will stand in your defense.
The greatest poet in Italian history, Dante Aligheri, knew your type. The grafters, that is, embezzlers, were drowned in a pit of pitch for all eternity. Dante was the master of the repulsive, and he described your stench in such detail that many modern readers actually smell what he describes. We imagine the smell is somewhere between raw sewage, a decaying corpse, and, of course, a skunk. We believe this approximates the smell of your souls. The thieves, however, are only slightly worse off, as they are surrounded by snakes around their wrists and groins, which would bite them (as their deeds bit others), immolate them, and then they would reform from the ashes. The snakes, we feel, symbolize you, as you slither around like serpents, and use your tongues to hiss sweet nothings into our ears and slink around in the dark, damp underbellies of society to steal. This account makes up perhaps a tenth of the entire Inferno. No other sin is given this much attention, and for good reason, because even traitors are at least doing only what can be expected of them, and they take after you.
Now, we would say more, but you surely have got the gist now, no matter how atrocious your spelling and grammar and even ability to use coherent URLS are.
In summation, you suck, and you will always suck. Get a life, and a job, and live like human beings. Or at least have the balls to steal to our faces, like actual thieves.
Fuck you.
With love,
All the victims you've ever defrauded.
